The present disclosure relates generally to data transfer methods between businesses. In particular, methods and systems for receiving variety of different business to business (B2B) standard data formats and converting them to a structured canonical XML format that is specific to a data user are described.
B2B data transfer solutions resent companies with great advantages. Time savings in data entry, reduction in mistakes, reduced continuing personnel costs, and opportunities for automation with existing back end business systems, to name some advantages, all make B2B data transfer between parties attractive. However, known methods and systems for transmitting B2B data between parties are not entirely satisfactory for the range of applications in which they are employed. For example, existing B2B integration is complex and expensive undertaking. The necessary software alone can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Employee costs for an implementation team with appropriate integration expertise can reach into the tens of millions of dollars in some cases, as title time to on-board a single B2B partner can be months. Consequently, the approximately 28 million small to medium businesses in the US alone are very often unable to integrate with existing B2B transaction systems due to the prohibitive costs.
Furthermore, B2B standards based translation is complicated by the existence of too many “standards,” which expands greatly to the breadth and orientation of all B2B software. A single company that does business with several partners who use B2B solutions may find that each partner has settled upon a different B2B standard, which multiplies cost and complexity if the single company want to utilize B2B transfers with each partner. By definition there should only be one standard, or it is not a standard. Furthermore, multiple standard are greatly redundant, as each standard is broad enough to enable transactions for anything any company on earth might process.
Thus, there exists a need for methods and systems for converting from various B2B standards that improve upon and advance the design of known methods and systems of B2B transfer and interchange. Examples of new and useful methods for converting B2B format to a canonical format relevant to the needs existing in the field are discussed below.